High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, because in so doing, they messed the annotations he’d created to the text for class (the annotations say things like “remember this paragraph for class” but the paragraph in question has been deleted)…

The case is intended to become a class-action on behalf of other Kindle owners whose annotations were deleted rendered useless by Amazon when it improperly deleted an infringing copy of the Orwell book from Kindles. Nothing in Amazon’s EULA or US copyright law gives them permission to delete books off your Kindle, so this sounds like a plausible suit to me.

I was waiting for this. Amazon probably consulted with their lawyers; did a cost/loss analysis and decided it was still cheaper to lose a class action than it would be to find a way not to steal from faithful customers.

Either way, we should all be “thankful” for attorneys… as slimy as many are. They are often the only person in our corner when it comes to defending our rights.